trust me im lying confessions of a me

You''''ve seen it all before. A malicious online rumor costs a company millions. A political sideshow derails the national news cycle and destroys a candidate. Some product or celebrity zooms from total obscurity to viral sensation. What you don’t know is that someone is responsible for all this. Usually, someone like me. I’m a media manipulator. In a world where blogs control and distort the news, my job is to control blogs—as much as any one person can.

PRAISE FOR RYAN HOLIDAY AND TRUST ME, I’M LYING

“Ryan Holiday’s absolutely brilliant exposé of the unreality of the Internet should be required

reading for every thinker in America.”

—Edward Jay Epstein, author of The Big Picture: Money and Power in Hollywood

“Behind my reputation as a marketing genius there is Ryan Holiday, who I consult often and has

helped build and done more for my business than just about anyone.”

—Dov Charney, CEO and founder of American Apparel

“Ryan is part Machiavelli, part Ogilvy, and all results From American Apparel to the quietcampaigns he’s run but not taken credit for, this whiz kid is the secret weapon you’ve never heard of.”

—Tim Ferriss, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The 4-Hour Workweek

“The strategies Ryan created to exploit blogs drove sales of millions of my books and made me

an internationally known name The reason I am standing here while other celebrities were destroyed

or became parodies of themselves is because of his insider knowledge.”

—Tucker Max, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell

“Just as I thought it would—it takes a twentysomething media insider to blow the lid off the realworkings of today’s so-called news media Holiday shows exactly how a handful of dodgy bloggers

control the whole system and turn our collective attention into their own profit.”

—Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur and Digital Vertigo

“When playing for high stakes, Ryan Holiday is my secret weapon His unique stealth manner

makes him essential for winning.”

—Aaron Ray, partner of the management/production company The Collective with over 150

million albums sold and $1 billion in movie revenues

“Ryan Holiday is a man you should listen to….[He] has a truly unique perspective on the seedy

underbelly of digital culture Ignore him at your peril!”

—Matt Mason, director of marketing at BitTorrent and author of The Pirate’s Dilemma: How

Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism

“In an area where hazy-headed utopianism reigns, Ryan Holiday excels in thinking about the

Internet and its future clearly.”

—Ethan Brown, author of Shake the Devil Off, a Washington Post Critic’s Pick

“Ryan Holiday is one of the only people brave enough to peer deep into the murky waters ofInternet ‘journalism’ to see how fabricated and unfounded information can be spun by greedy,unethical Internet overlords—destroying real people’s lives The danger is real—no one is immune

from this dystopian world.”

—Julia Allison, syndicated columnist and on-air correspondent, NBC New York

“Ryan Holiday is real Not only real, but notorious for creating risqué ads online for American

Apparel How could a kid barely legal to buy a drink be the Don Draper of the Fast Company

crowd?”

—317am.net

“Ryan Holiday is the Machiavelli of the Internet age Dismiss his message at your own peril: Hespeaks truths about the dark side of Internet media which no one else dares mention.”

—Michael Ellsberg, author of The Education of Millionaires: It’s Not What You Think and It’s

Not Too Late

“This primer on how to hack the media zeitgeist is so incredibly accurate, it just might rendermainstream media completely useless As opposed to mostly useless like it is now.”

—Drew Curtis, founder Fark.com

TRUST ME

I’M LYING

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All rights reservedIllustrations by Erin Tyler

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No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic formwithout permission Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials inviolation of the author’s rights Purchase only authorized editions

ALWAYS LEARNING

PEARSON

INTRODUCTION

BOOK ONE

FEEDING THE MONSTER

HOW BLOGS WORK

I BLOGS MAKE THE NEWS

II HOW TO TURN NOTHING INTO SOMETHING IN THREE

WAY-TOO-EASY STEPS III THE BLOG CON: HOW PUBLISHERS MAKE MONEY ONLINE

IV TACTIC #1: BLOGGERS ARE POOR; HELP PAY THEIR BILLS

V TACTIC #2: TELL THEM WHAT THEY WANT TO HEAR

VI TACTIC #3: GIVE THEM WHAT SPREADS, NOT WHAT’S GOOD

VII TACTIC # 4: HELP THEM TRICK THEIR READERS

VIII TACTIC #5: SELL THEM SOMETHING THEY CAN SELL (EXPLOIT THE

ONE-OFF PROBLEM)

IX TACTIC #6: MAKE IT ALL ABOUT THE HEADLINE

X TACTIC #7: KILL ‘EM WITH PAGEVIEW KINDNESS

XI TACTIC #8: USE THE TECHNOLOGY AGAINST ITSELF

XII TACTIC #9: JUST MAKE STUFF UP (EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING IT)

BOOK TWO

THE MONSTER ATTACKS

WHAT BLOGS MEAN

XIII IRIN CARMON, THE DAILY SHOW , AND ME: THE PERFECT STORM

OF HOW TOXIC BLOGGING CAN BE

XIV THERE ARE OTHERS: THE MANIPULATOR HALL OF FAME

XV CUTE BUT EVIL: ONLINE ENTERTAINMENT TACTICS THAT DRUG

YOU AND ME XVI THE LINK ECONOMY: THE LEVERAGED ILLUSION OF SOURCING XVII EXTORTION VIA THE WEB: FACING THE ONLINE SHAKEDOWN

XVIII THE ITERATIVE HUSTLE: ONLINE JOURNALISM’S BOGUS

PHILOSOPHY XIX THE MYTH OF CORRECTIONS

XX CHEERING ON OUR OWN DECEPTION

XXI THE DARK SIDE OF SNARK: WHEN INTERNET HUMOR ATTACKS

XXII THE 21 ST -CENTURY DEGRADATION CEREMONY: BLOGS AS

MACHINES OF HATRED AND PUNISHMENT

XXIII WELCOME TO UNREALITY

XXIV HOW TO READ A BLOG: AN UPDATE ON ACCOUNT OF ALL THE

LIES CONCLUSION: SO…WHERE TO FROM HERE?

IF YOU WERE BEING KIND, YOU WOULD SAY MY JOB IS IN marketing and publicrelations, or online strategy and advertising But that’s a polite veneer to hide the harsh truth I am, toput it bluntly, a media manipulator—I’m paid to deceive My job is to lie to the media so they can lie

to you I cheat, bribe, and connive for bestselling authors and billion-dollar brands and abuse myunderstanding of the Internet to do it

I have funneled millions of dollars to blogs through advertising I’ve given breaking news to blogs

instead of Good Morning America and, when that didn’t work, hired their family members I have

flown bloggers across the country, boosted their revenue by buying traffic, written their stories forthem, fabricated elaborate ruses to capture their attention, and courted them with expensive meals andscoops I’ve probably sent enough gift cards and T-shirts to fashion bloggers to clothe a smallcountry Why did I do all this? Because it was the only way I did it to build them up as sources,sources that I could influence and direct for my clients I used blogs to control the news

It’s why I found myself at 2:00 A.M. one morning, at a deserted intersection in Los Angeles, dressed

in all black In my hand I had tape and some obscene stickers made at Kinko’s earlier in theafternoon What was I doing here? I was there to deface billboards, specifically billboards I haddesigned and paid for Not that I’d expected to do anything like this, but there I was, doing it Mygirlfriend, coaxed into being my accomplice, was behind the wheel of the getaway car

After I finished, we circled the block and I took photos of my work from the passenger window as

if I had spotted it from the road Across the billboards was now a two-foot-long sticker that impliedthat the movie’s creator—my friend, Tucker Max—deserved to have his dick caught in a trap withsharp metal hooks Or something like that

As soon as I got home I dashed off two e-mails to two major blogs Under the fake name EvanMeyer I wrote, “I saw these on my way home last night It was on 3rd and Crescent Heights, I think.Good to know Los Angeles hates Tucker Max too,” and attached the photos

One blog wrote back: You’re not messing with me, are you?

No, I said Trust me, I’m not lying

The vandalized billboards and the coverage that my photos received were just a small part of the

deliberately provocative campaign I did for the movie I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell My friend

Tucker had asked me to create some controversy around the movie, which was based on hisbestselling book, and I did—somewhat effortlessly, it turns out It is one of many campaigns I havedone in my career, and by no means an unusual one But it illustrates a part of the media system that ishidden from your view: how the news is created and driven by marketers, and that no one doesanything to stop it

In under two weeks, and with no budget, thousands of college students protested the movie on theircampuses nationwide, angry citizens vandalized our billboards in multiple neighborhoods,FoxNews.com ran a front-page story about the backlash, Page Six of the New York Post made their

first of many mentions of Tucker, and the Chicago Transit Authority banned and stripped the movie’sadvertisements from their buses To cap it all off, two different editorials railing against the film ran

in the Washington Post and Chicago Tribune the week it was released The outrage about Tucker was great enough that a few years later, it was written into the popular television show Portlandia on

IFC

I guess it is safe to admit now that the entire firestorm was, essentially, fake.

I designed the advertisements, which I bought and placed around the country, and then promptlycalled and left anonymous complaints about them (and leaked copies of my complaints to blogs forsupport) I alerted college LGBT and women’s rights groups to screenings in their area and baitedthem to protest our offensive movie at the theater, knowing that the nightly news would cover it Istarted a boycott group on Facebook I orchestrated fake tweets and posted fake comments to articlesonline I even won a contest for being the first one to send in a picture of a defaced ad in Chicago

(thanks for the free T-shirt, Chicago RedEye Oh, also, that photo was from New York) I

manufactured preposterous stories about Tucker’s behavior on and off the movie set and reportedthem to gossip websites, which gleefully repeated them I paid for anti-woman ads on feministwebsites and anti-religion ads on Christian websites, knowing each would write about it Sometimes

I just Photoshopped ads onto screenshots of websites and got coverage for controversial ads thatnever actually ran The loop became final when, for the first time in history, I put out a press release

to answer my own manufactured criticism: TUCKER MAX RESPONDS TO CTA DECISION: “BLOW ME,” theheadline read

Hello, shitstorm of press Hello, number one on the New York Times bestseller list.

I pulled this off with no connections, no money, and no footsteps to follow But because of the waythat blogging is structured—from the way bloggers are paid by the pageview to the way blog postsmust be written to catch the reader’s attention—this was all very easy to do The system eats up thekind of material I produce So as the manufactured storm I created played itself out in the press, realpeople started believing it, and it became true

My full-time job then and now is director of marketing for American Apparel, a clothing companyknown for its provocative imagery and unconventional business practices But I orchestrate thesedeceptions for other high-profile clients as well, from authors who sell millions of books toentrepreneurs worth hundreds of millions of dollars I create and shape the news for them

Usually, it is a simple hustle Someone pays me, I manufacture a story for them, and we trade it up

the chain—from a tiny blog to Gawker to a website of a local news network to the Huffington Post to

the major newspapers to cable news and back again, until the unreal becomes real.* Sometimes I start

by planting a story Sometimes I put out a press release or ask a friend to break a story on their blog.Sometimes I “leak” a document Sometimes I fabricate a document and leak that Really, it can beanything, from vandalizing a Wikipedia page to producing an expensive viral video However theplay starts, the end is the same: The economics of the Internet are exploited to change publicperception—and sell product

Now I was hardly a wide-eyed kid when I left school to do this kind of PR full time I’d seenenough in the edit wars of Wikipedia and the politics of power users in social media to know thatsomething questionable was going on behind the scenes Half of me knew all this but another part of

me remained a believer I had my choice of projects, and I only worked on what I believed in (andyes, that included American Apparel and Tucker Max) But I got sucked into the media underworld,getting hit after publicity hit for my clients and propagating more and more lies to do so I struggled tokeep these parts of me separate as I began to understand the media environment I was working in, andthat there was something more than a little off about it

It worked until it stopped working for me Though I wish I could pinpoint the moment when it allfell apart, when I realized that the whole thing was a giant con, I can’t All I know is that, eventually, Idid

I studied the economics and the ecology of online media deeply in the pursuit of my craft I wanted

to understand not just how but why it worked—from the technology down to the personalities of thepeople who use it As an insider with access I saw things that academics and gurus and manybloggers themselves will never see Publishers liked to talk to me, because I controlled multimillion-dollar online advertising budgets, and they were often shockingly honest.

I began to make connections among these pieces of information and see patterns in history In booksdecades out of print I saw criticism of media loopholes that had now reopened I watched as basicpsychological precepts were violated or ignored by bloggers as they reported the “news.” Havingseen that much of the edifice of online publishing was based on faulty assumptions and self-servinglogic, I learned that I could outsmart it This knowledge both scared and emboldened me at the sametime I confess, I turned around and used this knowledge against the public interest, and for my owngain

An obscure item I found in the course of my research stopped me cold It was a mention of a 1913

editorial cartoon published in the long since defunct Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly Newspaper The

cartoon, it said, showed a businessman throwing coins into the mouth of a giant fang-bared monster ofmany arms which stood menacingly in front of him Each of its tentacle-like arms, which weredestroying the city around it, was tattooed with the words like: “Cultivating Hate,” “DistortingFacts,” and “Slush to Inflame.” The man is an advertiser and the mouth belongs to the maliciousyellow press that needs his money to survive Underneath is a caption: THE FOOL WHO FEEDS THE MONSTER

I knew I had to find this century-old drawing, though I wasn’t sure why As I rode the escalatorthrough the glass canyon of the atrium and into the bowels of the central branch of the Los AngelesPublic Library to search for it, it struck me that I wasn’t just looking for some rare old newspaper Iwas looking for myself I knew who that fool was He was me

In addiction circles, those in recovery also use the image of the monster as a warning They tell thestory of a man who found a package on his porch Inside was a little monster, but it was cute, like apuppy He kept it and raised it The more he fed it, the bigger it got and the more it needed to be fed

He ignored his worries as it grew bigger, more intimidating, demanding, and unpredictable, until oneday, as he was playing with it, the monster attacked and nearly killed him The realization that thesituation was more than he could handle came too late—the man was no longer in control Themonster had a life of its own

The story of the monster is a lot like my story Except my story is not about drugs or the yellowpress but of a bigger and much more modern monster—my monster is the brave new world of newmedia—one that I often fed and thought I controlled I lived high and well in that world, and Ibelieved in it until it no longer looked the same to me Many things went down I’m not sure where myresponsibility for them begins or ends, but I am ready to talk about what happened

I created false perceptions through blogs, which led to bad conclusions and wrong decisions—realdecisions in the real world that had consequences for real people Phrases like “known rapist” began

to follow what were once playfully encouraged rumors of bad or shocking behavior designed to getblog publicity for clients Friends were ruined and broken Gradually I began to notice work just likemine appearing everywhere, and no one catching on to it or repairing the damage Stocks took majorhits, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, on news from the same unreliable sources I’d often trickwith fake stories

In 2008, a Gawker blogger published e-mails stolen from my inbox by someone else trying to

intimidate a client through the media It was a humiliating and awful experience But with some

distance I now understand that Gawker had little choice about the role they played in the matter I

know that I was as much a part of the problem as they were.

I remember one day mentioning some scandal during a dinner conversation, one that I knew was

probably fake, probably a scam I did it because it was too interesting not to pass along I was lost in

the same unreality I’d forced on other people I found that not only did I not know what was realanymore, but that I no longer cared To borrow from Budd Schulberg’s description of a media

manipulator in his classic novel The Harder They Fall, I was “indulging myself in the illusions that

we can deal in filth without becoming the thing we touch.” I no longer have those illusions

Winston Churchill wrote of the appeasers of his age that “each one hopes that if he feeds thecrocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last.” I was even more delusional I thought I could skipbeing devoured entirely It would never turn on me I was in control I was the expert But I waswrong

WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK

Sitting next to my desk right now is a large box filled with hundreds of articles I have printed overthe last several years The articles show all the trademarks of the fakes and scams I myself have run,yet they involve many of biggest news and entertainment stories of the decade The margins are filledwith angry little notes and question marks The satirist Juvenal wrote of “cramming whole notebookswith scribbled invective” amid the corrupt opulence of Rome; that box and this book are mynotebooks from my own days inside such a world Collectively, it was this process that opened myeyes I hope it will have the same effect for you

Lately I have slowed my contributions to the pile of evidence, not because the quality of the contenthas improved, but because hope for anything different would be silly I’m not so foolish as to expectbloggers to know what they are talking about I no longer expect to be informed—not whenmanipulation is so easy for bloggers and marketers to profit from I can’t shake the constant suspicionthat others are baiting, tricking, or cheating me, just as I did to them It’s hard to browse the Internet

when you are haunted by the words of A J Daulerio, the editor of the popular sports blog Deadspin:

“It’s all professional wrestling.”1

Some of you, by the time you are done with this book, will probably hate me for ruining it for youtoo Or call me a liar Or accuse me of exaggerating You may not want me to expose the peoplebehind your favorite websites as the imbeciles, charlatans, and pompous frauds they are But it is aworld of many hustlers, and you are the mark The con is to build a brand off the backs of others.Your attention and your credulity are what’s stolen

This book isn’t structured like typical business books Instead of extended chapters, it is split intotwo parts, and each part is made up of short, overlapping, and reinforcing vignettes In the first part Iexplain why blogs matter, how they drive the news, and how they can be manipulated In the second Ishow what happens when you do this, how it backfires, and the dangerous consequences of ourcurrent system

What follows are the methods used to manipulate bloggers and reporters at the highest levels,broken down into nine simple tactics

Every one of these tactics reveals a critical vulnerability in our media system I will show youwhere they are and what can be done with them, and help you recognize when they’re being used onyou Sure, I am explaining how to take advantage of these weaknesses, but mostly I am saying that

these vulnerabilities exist It is the first time that these gaps have ever been exposed, by a critic or

otherwise Hopefully, once in the open they’ll no longer work as well I understand that there is some

contradiction in this position, as there has long been in me My dis-integration wasn’t always healthy,but it does allow me to explain our problems from a unique perspective.

This book is my experience behind the scenes in the worlds of blogging, PR, and onlinemachinations—and what those experiences say about the dominant cultural medium I’m speakingpersonally and honestly about what I know, and I know this space better than just about anyone

I didn’t intend to, but I’ve helped pioneer a media system designed to trick, cajole, and steal everysecond of the most precious resource in the world—people’s time I’m going to show you everysingle one of these tricks, and what they mean

What you choose to do with this information is up to you

* By “real” I mean that people believe it and act on it I am saying that the infrastructure of theInternet can be used against itself to turn a manufactured piece of nonsense into widespread outrageand then action It happens every day Every single day

BOOK ONE

FEEDING THE MONSTER

HOW BLOGS WORK

BLOGS MAKE THE NEWS

I CALL TO YOUR ATTENTION AN ARTICLE IN THE NEW York Times written at the earliest

of the earliest junctures of the 2012 presidential election, nearly two years before votes would becast.1

It told of a then obscure figure, Tim Pawlenty, the governor of Minnesota Pawlenty was not yet apresidential candidate He had no campaign director, no bus, few donors, and little name recognition

In fact, he did not even have a campaign It was January 2011, after all What he did have was a beat

reporter from the blog Politico following him from town to town with a camera and a laptop,

reporting every moment of his noncampaign

It’s a bit peculiar, if you think about it Even the New York Times , the newspaper that spends

millions of dollars a year for a Baghdad bureau, which can fund investigative reports five or ten years

in the making, didn’t have a reporter covering Pawlenty Yet Politico, a blog with only a fraction of the resources of a major newspaper, did The Times was covering Politico covering a noncandidate.

It was a little like a Ponzi scheme, and like all such schemes, it went from boom to bust Pawlentybecame a candidate, coverage of him generated millions of impressions online, then in print, andfinally on television, before he flamed out and withdrew from the race Despite all of this, hiscandidacy’s impact on the election was significant and real enough that the next Republican front-runner courted Pawlenty’s endorsement

There’s a famous twentieth-century political cartoon about the Associated Press that was, at thetime, the wire service responsible for supplying news to the majority of the newspapers in the UnitedStates In it an AP agent is pouring different bottles into a city’s water supply The bottles are labeled

“lies,” “prejudice,” “slander,” “suppressed facts,” and “hatred.” The image reads: “The News—Poisoned At Its Source.”

I think of blogs as today’s newswires

BLOGS MATTER

By “blog,” I’m referring collectively to all online publishing That’s everything from Twitteraccounts to major newspaper websites to web videos to group blogs with hundreds of writers I don’tcare whether the owners consider themselves blogs or not The reality is that they are all subject tothe same incentives, and they fight for attention with similar tactics.*

Most people don’t understand how today’s information cycle really works Many have no idea ofhow much their general worldview is influenced by the way news is generated online What beginsonline ends offline

Although there are millions of blogs out there, you’ll notice some mentioned a lot in this book:

Gawker, Business Insider, Politico, BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, Drudge Report, and the like This

is not because they are the most widely read, but instead because they are mostly read by the mediaelite, and their proselytizing owners, Nick Denton, Henry Blodget, Jonah Peretti, and AriannaHuffington, have an immense amount of influence A blog isn’t small if its puny readership is made up

of TV producers and writers for national newspapers

Radio DJs and news anchors once filled their broadcasts with newspaper headlines; today theyrepeat what they read on blogs—certain blogs more than others Stories from blogs also filter intoreal conversations and rumors that spread from person to person through word of mouth In short,blogs are vehicles from which mass media reporters—and your most chatty and “informed” friends—discover and borrow the news This hidden cycle gives birth to the memes that become our culturalreferences, the budding stars who become our celebrities, the thinkers who become our gurus, and thenews that becomes our news.

When I figured this out early in my career in public relations I thought what only a naive anddestructively ambitious twentysomething would have: If I master the rules that govern blogs, I can bethe master of all they determine It was, essentially, access to a fiat over culture

It may have been a dangerous thought, but it wasn’t hyperbole In the Pawlenty case, the guy couldhave become the president of the United States of America One early media critic put it this way:We’re a country governed by public opinion, and public opinion is largely governed by the press, soisn’t it critical to understand what governs the press? What rules over the media, he concluded, rules

over the country In this case, what rules over Politico literally almost ruled over everyone.

To understand what makes blogs act—why Politico followed Pawlenty around—is the key to

making them do what you want Learn their rules, change the game That’s all it takes to control publicopinion

SO, WHY DID POLITICO FOLLOW PAWLENTY?

On the face of it, it’s pretty crazy Pawlenty’s phantom candidacy wasn’t newsworthy, and if the

New York Times couldn’t afford to pay a reporter to follow him around, Politico shouldn’t have been

able to

It wasn’t crazy Blogs need things to cover The Times has to fill a newspaper only once per day A

cable news channel has to fill twenty-four hours of programming 365 days a year But blogs have to

fill an infinite amount of space The site that covers the most stuff wins.

Political blogs know that their traffic goes up during election cycles Since traffic is what they sell

to advertisers, elections equal increased revenue Unfortunately, election cycles come only every fewyears Worse still, they end Blogs have a simple solution: change reality through the coverage

With Pawlenty, Politico was not only manufacturing a candidate, they were manufacturing an entire

leg of the election cycle purely to profit from it It was a conscious decision In the story about his

business, Politico’s executive editor, Jim VandeHei, tipped his hand to the New York Times : “We

were a garage band in 2008, riffing on the fly Now we’re a 200-person production, with a precisefeel and plan We’re trying to take a leap forward in front of everyone else.”

When a blog like Politico tried to leap in front of everyone else, the person they arbitrarily

decided to cover was turned into an actual candidate The campaign starts gradually, with a fewmentions on blogs, moves on to “potential contender,” begins to be considered for debates, and isthen included on the ballot Their platform accumulates real supporters who donate real time andmoney to the campaign The campaign buzz is reified by the mass media, who covers and legitimizeswhatever is being talked about online

Pawlenty’s campaign for elected office may have failed, but for blogs and other media, it wasprofitable success He generated millions of pageviews for blogs, was the subject of dozens of

stories in print and online, and had his fair share of television time When Politico picked Pawlenty

they made the only bet worth making—where they had the power to control the outcome

In case you didn’t catch it, here’s the cycle again:

Political blogs need things to cover; traffic increases during election Reality (election far away) does not align with this

Political blogs create candidates early; move up start of election cycle The person they cover, by nature of coverage, becomes actual candidate (or president) Blogs profit (literally), the public loses

You’ll see this cycle repeated again and again in this book It’s true for celebrity gossip, politics,business news, and every other topic blogs cover The constraints of blogging create artificialcontent, which is made real and impacts the outcome of real world events

The economics of the Internet created a twisted set of incentives that make traffic more important—and more profitable—than the truth With the mass media—and today, mass culture—relying on theweb for the next big thing, it is a set of incentives with massive implications

Blogs need traffic, being first drives traffic, and so entire stories are created out of whole cloth tomake that happen This is just one facet of the economics of blogging, but it’s a critical one When weunderstand the logic that drives these business choices, those choices become predictable And what

is predictable can be anticipated, redirected, accelerated, or controlled—however you or I choose

Later in the election, Politico moved the goalposts again to stay on top Speed stopped working so

well, so they turned to scandal to upend the race once more Remember Herman Cain, thepreposterous, media-created candidate who came after Pawlenty? After surging ahead as the leadcontender for the Republican nomination, and becoming the subject of an exhausting number of traffic-friendly blog posts, Cain’s candidacy was utterly decimated by a sensational but still strongly denied

scandal reported by…you guessed it: Politico.

I’m sure there were powerful political interests that could not allow Cain to become anything morethan a sideshow So his narrative was changed, and some suspect it was done by a person just like

me, hired by another candidate’s campaign—and the story spread, whether it was true or not If true,from the looks of it whoever delivered the fatal blow did it exactly the way I would have: painfully,untraceably, and impossible to recover from

And so another noncandidate was created, made real, and then taken out Another one bit the dust

so that blogs could fill their cycle

*I have never been a fan of the word “blogosphere” and will use it only sparingly

HOW TO TURN NOTHING INTO SOMETHING IN THREE

WAY-TOO-EASY STEPS

IN THE INTRODUCTION I EXPLAINED A SCAM I CALL “trading up the chain.” It’s astrategy I developed that manipulates the media through recursion I can turn nothing into something byplacing a story with a small blog that has very low standards, which then becomes the source for astory by a larger blog, and that, in turn, for a story by larger media outlets I create, to use the words

of one media scholar, a “self-reinforcing news wave.” People like me do this everyday

The work I do is not exactly respectable But I want to explain how it works without any of thenegatives associated with my infamous clients I’ll show how I manipulated the media for a goodcause

A friend of mine recently used some of my advice on trading up the chain for the benefit of thecharity he runs This friend needed to raise money to cover the costs of a community art project, andchose to do it through Kickstarter, the crowdsourced fund-raising platform With just a few days’work, he turned an obscure cause into a popular Internet meme and raised nearly ten thousand dollars

to expand the charity internationally

Following my instructions, he made a YouTube video for the Kickstarter page showing off hischarity’s work Not a video of the charity’s best work, or even its most important work, but the workthat exaggerated certain elements aimed at helping the video spread (In this case, two or threeexamples in exotic locations that actually had the least amount of community benefit.) Next, he wrote

a short article for a small local blog in Brooklyn and embedded the video This site was chosen

because its stories were often used or picked up by the New York section of the Huffington Post As expected, the Huffington Post did bite, and ultimately featured the story as local news in both New

York City and Los Angeles Following my advice, he sent an e-mail from a fake address with theselinks to a reporter at CBS in Los Angeles, who then did a television piece on it—using mostly clipsfrom my friend’s heavily edited video In anticipation of all of this he’d been active on a channel ofthe social news site Reddit (where users vote on stories and topics they like) during the weeksleading up to his campaign launch in order to build up some connections on the site

When the CBS News piece came out and the video was up, he was ready to post it all on Reddit Itmade the front page almost immediately This score on Reddit (now bolstered by other press as well)

put the story on the radar of what I call the major “cool stuff” blogs—sites like BoingBoing, Laughing Squid, FFFFOUND!, and others—since they get post ideas from Reddit From this final

burst of coverage, money began pouring in, as did volunteers, recognition, and new ideas

With no advertising budget, no publicist, and no experience, his little video did nearly a halfmillion views, and funded his project for the next two years It went from nothing to something

This may have all been for charity, but it still raises a critical question: What exactly happened?

How was it so easy for him to manipulate the media, even for a good cause? He turned oneexaggerated amateur video into a news story that was written about independently by dozens ofoutlets in dozens of markets and did millions of media impressions It even registered nationally Hehad created and then manipulated this attention entirely by himself

Before you get upset at us, remember: We were only doing what Lindsay Robertson, a blogger

from Videogum, Jezebel, and New York magazine’s Vulture blog, taught us to do In a post explaining

to publicists how they could better game bloggers like herself, Lindsay advised focusing “on a lower

traffic tier with the (correct) understanding that these days, content filters up as much as it filters

down, and often the smaller sites, with their ability to dig deeper into the [I]nternet and be morenimble, act as farm teams for the larger ones.”*1

Blogs have enormous influence over other blogs, making it possible to turn a post on a site withonly a little traffic into posts on much bigger sites, if the latter happens to read the former Blogscompete to get stories first, newspapers compete to “confirm” it, and then pundits compete for airtime

to opine on it The smaller sites legitimize the newsworthiness of the story for the sites with biggeraudiences Consecutively and concurrently, this pattern inherently distorts and exaggerates whateverthey cover

THE LAY OF THE LAND

Here’s how it works There are thousands of bloggers scouring the web looking for things to

write about They must write several times each day They search Twitter, Facebook, comments

sections, press releases, rival blogs, and other sources to develop their material

Above them are hundreds of mid-level online and offline journalists on websites and blogs and inmagazines and newspapers who use those bloggers below them as sources and filters They also have

to write constantly—and engage in the same search for buzz, only a little more developed

Above them are the major national websites, publications, and television stations They in turnbrowse the scourers below them for their material, grabbing their leads and turning them into truly

national conversations These are the most influential bunch—the New York Times, the Today Show,

and CNN—and dwindling revenues or not, they have massive reach

Finally, between, above, and throughout these concentric levels is the largest group: us, the

audience We scan the web for material that we can watch, comment on, or share with our friends andfollowers

It’s bloggers informing bloggers informing bloggers all the way down This isn’t anecdotalobservation It is fact In a media monitoring study done by Cision and George Washington

University, 89 percent of journalists reported using blogs for their research for stories Roughly half

reported using Twitter to find and research stories, and more than two thirds use other socialnetworks, such as Facebook or LinkedIn, in the same way.2 The more immediate the nature of theirpublishing mediums (blogs, then newspapers, then magazines), the more heavily a journalist willdepend on sketchy online sources, like social media, for research

Recklessness, laziness, however you want to categorize it, the attitude is openly tolerated andacknowledged The majority of journalists surveyed admitted to knowing that their online sourceswere less reliable than traditional ones Not a single journalist said they believed that the informationgathered from social media was “a lot more reliable” than traditional media! Why? Because it suffersfrom a “lack of fact-checking, verification or reporting standards.”3

For the sake of simplicity, let’s break the chain into three levels I know these levels as one thingonly: beachheads for manufacturing news I don’t think someone could have designed a system easier

to manipulate if they wanted to

Level 1: The Entry Point

At the first level, small blogs and hyperlocal websites that cover your neighborhood or particular

scene are some of the easiest sites to get traction on Since they typically write about local, personalissues pertaining to a contained readership, trust is very high At the same time, they are cash-strapped and traffic-hungry, always on the lookout for a big story that might draw a big spike of newviewers It doesn’t have to be local, though; it can be a site about a subject you know very well, or itcan be a site run by a friend.

What’s important is that the site is small and understaffed This makes it possible to sell them astory that is only loosely connected to their core message but really sets you up to transition to thenext level

Level 2: The Legacy Media

Here we begin to see a mix of online and offline sources The blogs of newspapers and localtelevision stations are some of the best targets For starters, they share the same URL and often get

aggregated in Google News Places like the Wall Street Journal , Newsweek, and CBS all have sister

sites like SmartMoney.com, Mainstreet.com, BNet.com, and others that feature the companies’ logosbut have their own editorial standards not always as rigorous as their old media counterparts’ Theyseem legitimate, but they are, as Fark.com founder Drew Curtis calls them, just “Mass MediaSections That Update More Often but with Less Editorial Oversight.”

Legacy media outlets are critical turning points in building up momentum The reality is that thebloggers at Forbes.com or the Chicago Tribune do not operate on the same editorial guidelines astheir print counterparts However, their final output can be made to look like they carry the sameweight If you get a blog on Wired.com to mention your startup, you can smack “‘A revolutionary

device’—Wired” on the box of your product just as surely as you could if Wired had put your CEO on

the cover of the magazine

These sites won’t write about just anything, though, so you need to create chatter or a strong storyangle to hook this kind of sucker Their illusion of legitimacy comes at the cost of being slightly moreselective when it comes to what they cover But it is worth the price, because it will grant the biggerwebsites in your sights later the privilege of using magic words like: “NBC is reporting …”

Level 3: National

Having registered multiple stories from multiple sources firmly onto the radar of both local andmidlevel outlets, you can now leverage this coverage to access the highest level of media: thenational press Getting to this level usually involves less direct pushing and a lot more massaging.The sites that have already taken your bait are now on your side They desperately want their articles

to get as much traffic as possible, and being linked to or mentioned on national sites is how they dothat These sites will take care of submitting your articles to news aggregator sites like Digg, becausemaking the front page will drive tens of thousands of visitors to their article Mass media reportersmonitor aggregators for story ideas, and often cover what is trending there, like they did with thecharity story after it made the front page of Reddit In today’s world even these guys have to think likebloggers—they need to get as many pageviews as possible Success on the lower levels of the mediachain is evidence that the story could deliver even better results from a national platform

You just want to make sure that such reporters notice the story’s gaining traction Take the outletwhere you’d ultimately like to receive coverage and observe it for patterns You’ll notice that they

tend to get their story ideas from the same second-level sites, and by tailoring the story to those

smaller sites (or site), it sets you up to be noticed by the larger one The blogs on Gawker and Mediabistro, for instance, are read very heavily by the New York City media set You can craft the

story for those sites and automatically set yourself up to appeal to the other reporters reading it—without ever speaking to them directly An example: Katie Couric claims she gets many story ideasfrom her Twitter followers, which means that getting a few tweets out of the seven hundred or sopeople she follows is all it takes to get a shot at the nightly national news

News anchors aren’t the only people susceptible to this trick Scott Vener, the famous hit maker

responsible for picking the songs that go into HBO’s trendiest shows, like Entourage and How to Make It in America, has a reputation for discovering “unknown artists.” Really, he admits, most of

the music he finds is just “what is bubbling up on the Internet.”4 Since Vener monitors conversations

on Twitter and the comments on trendy music blogs, a shot at a six-figure HBO payday and instantmainstream exposure is just a few manufactured bubbles away

It’s a simple illusion: Create the perception that the meme already exists and all the reporter (or themusic supervisor or celebrity stylist) is doing is popularizing it They rarely bother to look past thefirst impressions

LEVELS 1, 2, 3:

HOW I TRADED UP THE CHAIN

My campaign for I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell began by vandalizing the billboards The graffiti was designed to bait two specific sites, Curbed Los Angeles and Mediabistro’s FishbowlLA.

When I sent them photos of my work under the fake name Evan Meyer, they both quickly picked it up.5

(For his contributions as a tipster, Evan earned his own Mediabistro profile, which still exists.

According to the site he has not been “sighted” since.)

Curbed LA began their post by using my e-mail verbatim:

A reader writes: “I saw these on my way home last night It was on 3rd and Crescent Heights, I think Good to know Los Angeles hates him too.” Provocateur Tucker Max’s new movie “I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell” opens this weekend [emphasis mine].

Thanks for the plug!

In creating outrage for the movie, I had a lot of luck getting local websites to cover or spread thenews about protests of the screenings we had organized through anonymous tips.* They were theeasiest place to get the story started We would send them a few offensive quotes and say somethinglike “This misogynist is coming to our school and we’re so fucking pissed Could you help spread theword?” Or I’d e-mail a neighborhood site to say that “a controversial screening with rumors of alocal boycott” was happening in a few days

Sex, college protesters, Hollywood—it was the definition of the kind of local story newsproducers love After reading about the growing controversy on the small blogs I conned, they wouldoften send camera crews to the screenings The video of the story would get posted on the station’swebsite, and then get covered again by the other, larger blogs in that city, like those hosted by a

newspaper or companies like the Huffington Post I was able to get the story to register, however

briefly, by using a small site with low standards of newsworthiness Other media outlets might bealerted to this fact, and in turn cover it, giving me another bump At this point I now have something to

work with Three or four links are the makings of a trend piece, or even a controversy—that’s allmajor outlets and national website need to see to get excited Former Slate.com media critic JakeShafer called such manufactured online controversy “frovocation”—a portmanteau of fauxprovocation It works incredibly well.

The key to getting from the second to the third level is the soft sell I couldn’t very well e-mail a

columnist at the Washington Post and say, “Hey, will you denounce our movie so we can benefit

from the negative PR?” So I targeted the sites that those kinds of columnists were likely to read

Gawker and Mediabistro are very media-centric, so we tailored stories to them to queue ourselves

up for outrage from their audiences—which happen to include reporters at places like the

Washington Post.* And when I want to be direct, I would register a handful of fake e-mail addresses

on Gmail or Yahoo and send e-mails with a collection of all the links gathered so far and say, “Howhave you not done a story about this yet?” Reporters rarely get substantial tips or alerts from theirreaders, so to get two or even three legitimate tips about an issue is a strong signal

So I sent it to them Well, kind of I actually just did more of the same fake tips from fake e-mailaddresses that worked for the other sites—only this time I had a handful of links from major blogs thatmade it clear that everyone was talking about it At this point something amazing happened: Thecoverage my stunts received began helping the twenty-thousand-dollar-a-month publicist the moviehad hired Rejections from late-night television, newspaper interviews, and morning radio turned intocallbacks Tucker did Carson Daly’s NBC late-night show for the first time By the end of thischarade, hundreds of reputable reporters, producers, and bloggers had been swept up intoparticipating Thousands more had eagerly gobbled up news about it on multiple blogs Each timethey did, views of the movie trailer spiked, book sales increased, and Tucker became more famousand more controversial If only people had known they were promoting the offensive Tucker Maxbrand for us, just as we’d planned

With just a few simple moves, I’d taken his story from level 1 to level 3—not just once but severaltimes, back and forth Ultimately the movie did not do nearly as well at release as we’d hoped—thissupplementary guerrilla marketing ended up being the entirety of the movie’s advertising efforts ratherthan a small part of it for reasons outside of my control—but the attention generated by the campaignwas overwhelming and incredibly lucrative Eventually the movie became a cult hit on DVD

Once you get a story like this started it takes on a life of its own That’s what happened after Ivandalized Tucker’s billboards Exactly one week later, inspired by my example, sixteen feminists

gathered in New York City late at night to vandalize I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell posters all over

Manhattan.6 Their campaign got even more coverage than my stunt, including a 650-word,

three-picture story on a Village Voice blog with dozens of comments (I posted some comments under fake

names to get people riled up, but looking at them now I can’t tell which ones are fake and which arereal) From the fake came real action

THE MEDIA: DANCING WITH ITSELF

Trading up the chain relies on a concept created by crisis public relations expert Michael Sitrick.When attempting to turn things around for a particularly disliked or controversial client, Sitrick wasfond of saying, “We need to find a lead steer!” The media, like any group of animals, gallops in aherd It takes just one steer to start a stampede The first level is your lead steer The rest is justpointing everyone’s attention to the direction it went in

Remember: Every person (with the exception of a few at the top layer) in this ecosystem is under

immense pressure to produce content under the tightest of deadlines Yes, you have something to sell.But more than ever they desperately, desperately need to buy The flimsiest of excuses is all it takes.

It freaked me out when I began to see this sort of thing happen without the deliberate prodding of a

promoter like myself I saw media conflagrations set off by internal sparks In this networked,interdependent world of blogging, misinformation can spread even when no one is consciouslypushing or manipulating it The system is so primed, tuned, and ready that often it doesn’t need peoplelike me The monster can feed itself

Sometimes just a single quote taken out of context can set things off In early 2011, a gossipreporter for an AOL entertainment blog asked former quarterback Kurt Warner who he thought would

be the next ex-athlete to join the show Dancing with the Stars Warner jokingly suggested Brett

Favre, who was then embroiled in a sexual harassment scandal Though the show told him theywanted nothing to do with Favre, the reporter still titled the post “Brett Favre Is Kurt Warner’s Pick

to Join ‘Dancing’: ‘Controversy Is Good for Ratings,’” and tagged it as an exclusive The post made

it clear that Warner was just goofing around

Two days later the blog Bleacher Report linked to the piece but made it sound as though Warner

was seriously urging Favre to join the show (which, remember, had just told AOL they wantednothing to do with Favre)

After their story, the rumor started to multiply rapidly A reporter from a local TV-news website,KCCI Des Moines, caught the story and wrote a sixty-two-word piece titled “Brett Favre’s Next Big

Step?” and mentioned the “rumors” discussed on Bleacher Report From there the piece was picked

up by USA Today —“Brett Favre Joining ‘Dancing With the Stars’ Season 12 Cast?”—ProFootballTalk, and others, making the full transition to the national stage.7

To recap what happened: a gossip blog manufactured a scoop by misrepresenting, deliberately ornot, a joke That scoop was itself misrepresented and misinterpreted as it traveled up the chain, goingfrom a small entertainment blog to a sports site to a CBS affiliate in Iowa and eventually to thewebsite of one of the biggest newspapers in the country.* What spread was not even a rumor, which

at least would have been logical It was just an empty bit of nothing

The fake Favre meme spread almost exactly along the lines of my fake outrage campaign forTucker’s movie—only there was no me involved! The media is hopelessly interdependent Not only

is the web susceptible to spreading false information, but it can also be the source of it

For a gossip story, it’s not a big deal But the same weakness creates the opportunity for dangerous,even deadly, abuses of the system

A TRUE FOOL FEEDING THE MONSTER

I am obviously jaded and cynical about trading up the chain How could I not be? It’s basicallypossible to run anything through this chain, even utterly preposterous and made-up information Butfor a long time I thought that fabricated media stories could only hurt feelings and waste time I didn’t

think anyone could die because of it.

I was wrong Perhaps you remember Terry Jones, the idiotic pastor whose burning of the Koran inMarch 2011 led to riots that killed nearly thirty people in Afghanistan Jones’s bigotry happened totrade up the chain perfectly, and the media unwittingly allowed it

Jones first made a name for himself in the local Florida press by running offensive billboards infront of his church Then he stepped it up, announcing that he planned to stage a burning of the Koran.This story was picked up by a small website called Religion News Service Yahoo linked to their

short article, and dozens of blogs followed, which led CNN to invite Jones to appear on the network.

He was now a national story

Yet the media and the public, aware of the potential implications of airing video of his act, began

to push back Many decided they would not air such a video Some five hundred people attended aprotest in Kabul where they burned Jones in effigy At the last second Jones, under pressure, backeddown, and the crisis was averted

But Terry Jones was back a few months later, announcing for the second time that he planned toburn the Koran Each blog and outlet that covered the lead-up to the burning made the story—and themedia monster that was Terry Jones—that much bolder and bigger Reporters asked if a directrequest from President Obama would stop him, which of course meant that the president of the UnitedStates of America would have to negotiate with a homegrown terrorist (he traded up the chain to the

most powerful man in the world).

This circus was what finally pushed Jones over the edge In March 2011, he went through with theburning, despite the threatened media blackout

He called their bluff and it worked The blackout fell apart when a college student named AndrewFord, freelancing for the wire service Agence France-Presse, took advantage of a story too dirty anddangerous for many journalists to touch in good conscience.*

Agence France-Presse, Ford’s publisher, is syndicated on Google and Yahoo! News Theyimmediately republished his article The story began to go up the chain, getting bigger and bigger.Roughly thirty larger blogs and online news services had picked up Ford’s piece or linked to it in thefirst day It made the story too big for the rest of the media—including the foreign press—to continue

to resist So the news of Jones’s Koran burning, a calculated stunt to extract attention from a systemthat could not prevent itself from being exploited, became known to the world And it was a deadlymonster of a story

Within days, twenty-seven people were killed during riots in Afghanistan, including seven UNworkers; forty more were injured Christians were specifically targeted, and Taliban flags wereflown in the streets of the Kabul “It took just one college student to defeat a media blackout and move

a story halfway around the globe within twenty-four hours,” the Poynter Institute wrote in an analysis

of the reporting This was, as Forbes journalist Jeff Bercovici put it, truly an example of “when

Journalism 2.0 kills.”8

One kook, one overeager young journalist, unintentionally show why trading up the chain—feedingthe monster—can be so dangerous (though for Jones, very effective) They weren’t just turningnothing into something The beast these blogs built up was set off needless bloodshed

You can trade up the chain for charity or you can trade up it to create funny fake news—or you can

do it to create violence, hatred, and even incidentally, death I’ve done the first two, while others, out

of negligence or malice, have done the latter At the end of the day, intentions are not a justificationI’m going to hide behind There is more than enough blame to go around

* Proving this theory unnervingly correct, Newsweek picked up the Lindsay’s advice from her tiny

personal blog and reposted it on the the official Newsweek Tumblr.

* It is standard practice in journalism that the identity of anonymous sources must be shared withthe editor so that they know the person is real and the writer hasn’t been tricked I have been used as

an anonymous source for blogs dozens of times No one has ever asked my identity, I’ve never beenverified, and I have never spoken to an editor.

* In fact, a few years later one of the sites we exploited repeatedly while promoting the moviewrote a post titled: “Are traditional news media stealing scoops from bloggers?,” which accused the

Chicago Tribune of stealing article ideas from her blog Chicago Now She was right, they were stealing, and that’s exactly how we got coverage into the editorial page of the Tribune.

* This was excellently caught and detailed by Quickish in its post “‘Brett Farve on Dancing Withthe Stars?’ No Not Even a Rumor”; their research was promptly stolen and reposted by the oft-guilty

Deadspin for an easy twenty-five thousand pageviews.

* This happens in politics all the time, as Democratic consultant Christian Grantham told Forbes,

“Campaigns understand that there are some stories that regular reporters won’t print So they’ll givethose stories to the blogs.” (Daniel Lyons, “Attack of the Blogs,” last modified November 14, 2005,http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2005/1114/128_3.html)

THE BLOG CON

HOW PUBLISHERS MAKE MONEY ONLINE

STRIPPED BARE, THE ECONOMICS OF ONLINE NEWS—the way blogging really works—is

a shocking thing I’ve never been desperate enough to need to work inside the system as a lowly (un-)paid blogger, but as an outsider (a press agent and a media buyer), I saw plenty What I learned is the

ways that sites such as AOL, the Huffington Post, and even the website of the New York Times make

their money, and how much money they actually make

This matters, because as businesses designed to make money, the way in which they do business isthe main filter for how they do the news Every story they produce must contort itself to fit this mold

—whatever the topic or subject I will show you this by explaining exactly how I have exploitedthese economics for my own personal gain You’re free to view these lessons as opportunities or asloopholes that must be closed I see them as both

TRAFFIC IS MONEY

On the face of it, blogs make their money from selling advertisements These advertisements arepaid for by the impression (generally a rate per thousand impressions) A site might have several adunits on each page; the publisher’s revenue equals the cumulative CPM (cost per thousand) multiplied

by the number of pageviews Advertisement × Traffic = Revenue An ad buyer like me buys thisspace by the millions—ten million impressions on this site, five million on another, fifty millionthrough a network A few blogs produce a portion of their revenue through selling extras—hostingconferences or affiliate deals—but, for the most part, this is the business: Traffic is money

A portion of the advertising on blogs is sold directly by the publisher, a portion is sold by salesreps who work on commission, and the rest is sold by advertising networks that specialize in theremaining inventory Regardless of who sells it or who buys it, what matters is that every adimpression on a site is monetized, if only for a few pennies Each and every pageview is money in thepocket of the publisher

Publishers and advertisers can’t differentiate between the types of impressions an ad does on asite A perusing reader is no better than an accidental reader An article that provides worthwhileadvice is no more valuable than one instantly forgotten So long as the page loads and the ads areseen, both sides are fulfilling their purpose A click is a click

Knowing this, blogs do everything they can to increase the latter variable in the equation (traffic,pageviews) It’s how you must understand them as a business Every decision a publisher makes is

ruled by one dictum: traffic by any means.

Scoops Are Traffic

One of the biggest shocks to the online world was the launch of TMZ The blog was developed by

AOL in 2005, and revenues skyrocketed to nearly $20 million a year almost immediately, paving theway for its now famous television program This was all accomplished through a handful of majorscoops Or at least, TMZ’s special definition of “scoops.”

The blog’s founder, Harvey Levin, once said in an interview that TMZ is “a serious news

operation that has the same rigid standards that any news operation in America has.” This is the samesite that once published, at 4:07 A.M., an exclusive scoop: a blurry, never-before-seen photo of futurepresident John F Kennedy on a boat filled with naked women This EXCLUSIVE scoop washeadlined “The JFK Photo That Could Have Changed History.” Only it couldn’t have altered worldevents for one simple reason: The man in the photo wasn’t JFK In fact, it turned out to be a spread

from a 1967 issue of Playboy.1 Oops!

Despite missteps like this, TMZ turned scoop-getting into a science They broke the story of Mel

Gibson’s anti-Semitic outbursts during his DUI arrest And then got video of Michael Richards’sracist onstage meltdown, posted the bruised Rihanna police photo, and announced the news of

Michael Jackson’s death TMZ originated four of the biggest stories to come from the Internet and

captured a substantial audience from these enormous surges of traffic.* They didn’t always use themost reputable or reliable means off getting their scoops, but nevertheless, today when people think

celebrity news, they think of TMZ (They don’t think of Defamer, Gawker’s predecessor to TMZ,

which was shuttered because it couldn’t deliver any scoops and they don’t like Perez Hilton’s sillylittle drawings anymore either.)

It sent a very clear message to publishers: Exclusives build blogs Scoops equal traffic

The thing is, exclusive scoops are rare, and at the very least, they require some effort to obtain Sogreedy blogs have perfected what is called the “pseudo-exclusive.” In a private memo to hisemployees, Nick Denton, founder and publisher of the Gawker Media blog empire, asked the writers

to use this technique, because it allows them “to take ownership of a story even if it isn’t a strictexclusive.”2 In other words, pretend they have a scoop The strategy works well, because many

readers will see the story in only one place; they have no idea that it was actually broken or originallyreported elsewhere

One of Gawker’s biggest scoops early on in the race—certainly a TMZ-level story—was a

collection of Tom Cruise Scientology videos It is a good example of a pseudo-exclusive, since thework wasn’t done by the site who eventually got all the pageviews from it Since I witnessed thestory unfold behind the scenes, I know that tapes were actually unearthed by Hollywood journalistMark Ebner, whose blog I was advising at the time Ebner called me, very excited with news of apotentially huge scoop and said that he’d bring over the materials A few hours later, he gave mesome DVDs in an envelope marked confidential, which I watched later that night with a friend Ourstupid reaction: “Tom Cruise being crazy; how is that new?”

Gawker had a different reaction See, Ebner had also shown the clips to his friends at Gawker,

who turned around and immediately posted a story featuring the videos before Mark or anyone else

had a chance to I don’t know whether Gawker promised Mark they’d give him credit All I know is

that what happened was shitty: Their post went on to do 3.2 million views and bring their site a

whole new audience Mark received nothing, because Gawker didn’t link back to his site—which would have been the right thing to do By doing this, Gawker owned a story that was not theirs Only

after did I begin to understand how blog fortunes were made: off the backs of others

When all it takes is one story to propel a blog from the dredges of the Internet to mainstreamnotoriety, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that sites will do anything to get their shot, even if it meansmanufacturing or stealing scoops (and deceiving readers and advertisers in the process)

Established media doesn’t have this problem They aren’t anxious for name recognition, becausethey already have it Instead of bending the rules (and the truth) to get it, their main concern for theirbusiness model is to protect their reputations This is a critical difference Media was once about

protecting a name; on the web it is about building one.

Using Names to Build a Name

Blogs are built on scoops and traffic, and this is made possible by big names The economics ofthe Internet values consistent hitters, and so one of the safest bets a site can make is to lock up an all-star or A-list blogger to helm their business Like so much of the history of blogging, this trend begins

with Gawker…sort of.

In 2004, Jason Calacanis, the found of Weblogs, Inc., poached editor Pete Rojas away from

Gizmodo, at the time the dominant gadget blog owned by Gawker He gave Rojas a small equity stake

in his company, and together they founded Engadget, which quickly surpassed Gizmodo as the reigning champion of scoops and big stories After founding Engadget, Rojas created another site for Calacanis, this time a video game blog called Joystiq, which became another enormously popular

site

Next, there is Andrew Sullivan, who makes Rojas look like a minor league player Sullivan’s name

and blog, The Dish, is one of the most sought-after to build a site around His now decade-old site was first leased by Time magazine’s website and spent several years under their domain He was then

stolen away from Time.com by TheAtlantic.com to bring digital life to the faltering print publication.Sullivan delivered; his Daily Dish would eventually draw more than one million visitors a month to

The Atlantic Like any franchise athlete, they were able to build a team around him, using his name to attract writers and influential readers In 2011, Sullivan left for The Daily Beast, in order to start the cycle all over again—but the bump in traffic and prestige stayed at The Atlantic The Daily Beast, fresh from its merger with Newsweek, was equally desperate for traffic and name recognition and was

willing to pay serious money for a shot of Sullivan’s brand-building power

Bringing in big (online) names is now a go-to move for sites trying to build traffic The New York Times brought the Freakonomics blog under their umbrella in 2007, and later did the same with Nate

Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com B5Media launched Crushable.com and TheGloss.com under the charge

of notorious Gawker founding editor Elizabeth Spiers The Huffington Post built most of its original

cache by having celebrities blog on the site, a rarer feat then than it is now The list goes on and on.All these bloggers, from Sullivan to Rojas to Spiers, got their high-paying gigs (and often apercentage of a site’s revenue) because they built big names for themselves Their strategy is the same

as their publisher’s: Build a brand by courting controversy, breaking big scoops, driving comments,

and publishing constantly And their big deals with sites like the New York Times or The Daily Beast

make these questionable tactics all the more necessary The big names have to stay big to stay on top

THE BLOG CON: NAMES, SCOOPS, AND TRAFFIC CREATE AN EXIT

I’ve written about how sites engage in an endless chase for revenue through pageviews, and that

is what they do However, blogs are not intended to be profitable and independent businesses The

tools they use to build traffic and revenue are part of a larger play

Blogs are built to be sold Though they make substantial revenues from advertising, the real money

is in selling the entire site to a larger company for a multiple of the traffic and earnings Usually to arich sucker

Weblogs, Inc was sold to AOL for $25 million The Huffington Post was sold to AOL for $315

million in cash, with its owner, Arianna Huffington, deliberately eschewing the opportunity to wait

and build for an IPO TechCrunch was also sold to AOL for $30 million Discovery bought the blog TreeHugger for $10 million Ars Technica was sold to Condé Nast for more than $20 million Know Your Meme was acquired by Cheezburger Media for seven figures FOX Sports Interactive purchased the sports blog network Yardbarker I worked on an acquisition like this myself when The Collective,

a talent management company I advise, bought Bloody Disgusting, a blog about horror films, with an

eye on potentially selling it to someone bigger down the line

Blogs are built and run with an exit in mind This is really why they need scoops and acquiremarquee bloggers—to build up their names for investors and to show a trend of rapidly increasingtraffic The pressure for this traffic in a short period of time is intense And desperation, as a mediamanipulator knows, is the greatest quality you can hope for in a potential victim Each blog is its ownmini-Ponzi scheme, for which traffic growth is more important than solid financials, brandrecognition more important than trust, and scale more important than business sense Blogs are built

so someone else will want it—one stupid buyer cashing out the previous ones—and millions ofdollars are exchanged for essentially worthless assets

ANYTHING GOES IN THE DEN OF THIEVES

It doesn’t surprise me at all that shady business deals and conflicts of interest abound in thisworld My favorite example, of course, is myself I am regularly the online ad buyer and the publicist

or PR contact for the clients I represent So the same sites that snarkily cover my companies alsodepend on me for large six- or even seven-figure checks each year On the same day a writer for ablog might be e-mailing me for information about a rumor they heard, their publisher is calling me onthe phone asking if I want to increase the size of my ad buy Later in this book I’ll write about howdifficult it is to get bloggers to correct even blatantly inaccurate stories—this conflict of interest wasone of the only effective tools I could use to combat that Naturally, nobody minded what I was doing,because they were too busy lining their own pockets to care

Michael Arrington, the loudmouth founder and former editor in chief of TechCrunch, is famous for investing in the start-ups that his blogs would then cover Although he no longer runs TechCrunch, he

was a partner in two investment funds during his tenure and now manages his own, CrunchFund Inother words, even when he is not a direct investor he has connections or interests in dozens ofcompanies on his beat, and his insider knowledge helps turn profits for the firm

When criticized for these conflicts he responded by saying that his competitors were simplyjealous because he was—I’m not kidding—“a lot better than them.” So when Arrington blew the lidoff a secret meeting of angel investors in Silicon Valley in 2011—later known as “Angelgate”—it’shard to say whose interests he was serving, his readers’ or his own Or maybe he was upset notbecause collusion is wrong but because the group had declined to invite him and—again, not kidding

—treated him rudely when he showed up anyway He ultimately left TechCrunch after a highly

publicized fight with the new owners, AOL, who dared to question this conflict of interest

Nick Denton of Gawker is also a prolific investor in his own space, often putting money in

companies founded by employees who left his company or were fired He has stakes in several local

blog networks, such as Curbed, that are often linked to or written about on his larger sites By

shuffling users around to two sites he can charge advertisers twice Denton also invested in the siteCityfile, which he was able to pump up with traffic from his other blogs before acquiring it outright

and rolling it back into Gawker.

Influence is ultimately the goal of most blogs and blog publishers, because that influence can besold to a larger media company But, as Arrington and Denton show, influence can also be abused forprofit through strategic investments—be it in the companies they write about or where they decide tosend monetizeable traffic And, of course, these are only the conflicts of interest blatant enough to bediscovered by the public Who knows what else goes on behind the curtain?

ENTER: THE MANIPULATOR

Bloggers eager to build names and publishers eager to sell their blogs are like two crookedbusinessmen colluding to create interest in a bogus investment opportunity—building up buzz andclearing town before anyone gets wise In this world, where the rules and ethics are lax, a thirdplayer can exert massive influence Enter: the media manipulator

The assumptions of blogging and their owners present obvious vulnerabilities that people like meexploit They allow us to control what is in the media, because the media is too busy chasing profits

to bother trying to stop us They are not motivated to care Their loyalty is not to their audience but tothemselves and their con While ultimately this is reason to despair, I have found one small solace:Conning the conmen is one of life’s most satisfying pleasures And it’s not even hard

In the next chapters I will outline how to do this and how it is being done I have broken down themanipulation of blogs into nine effective tactics Each exposes a pathetic vulnerability in our mediasystem—each, when wielded properly, levels the playing field and gives you free rein to control theflow of information on the web

* Exclusives, as they are called, are important for another reason Advertising a story as anexclusive by extension takes a dig at a publication’s competitors: “We got this story and they didn’t—because we’re better.” This is partly why a site would rather post a weak exclusive on its front pagethan a more interesting story they’ve been forced to share with others

TACTIC #1

BLOGGERS ARE POOR; HELP PAY THEIR BILLS

THERE ARE MANY WAYS TO GIVE SOMEONE A BRIBE Very rarely does it mean handingthem a stack of bills You use this logic and the criteria that bloggers’ employers use to determine thesize of their paycheck—the stuff bloggers are paid for—can be co-opted and turned into an indirectbribe These levers were easy enough for me to find, and properly identified and wielded, they turnedout to be as effective as any overt payoff.

It begins with how these bloggers are hired Put aside any notion that applicants are chosen based

on skill, integrity, or a love of their craft Ben Parr, editor at large at the popular technology blog

Mashable, was once asked what he looked for when he hired writers for his blogs His answer was

one word: quickness “Online journalism is fast-paced,” he explained “We need people that can getthe story out in minutes and can compose the bigger opinion pieces in a couple hours, not a couple ofdays.” As to any actual experience in journalism, that would be considered only “a definite plus.”1

The payment structure of blogging reflects this emphasis on speed over other variables, such asquality, accuracy, or how informative the content might be Early on blogs tended to pay their writers

a rate per post or a flat rate with a minimum number of posts required per day Engadget, Slashfood, Autoblog, and other sites run by Weblogs, Inc paid bloggers a reported five hundred dollars a month

in 2005 for 125 posts—or four dollars a post, four per day.2 Gawker paid writers twelve dollars a

post as late as 2008 And of course these rates don’t include the other duties bloggers are stuck with,such editing, responding to e-mails, and writing comments Professional blogging is done in the boilerroom, and it is brutal

Gawker set the curve for the industry again when they left the pay-per-post model and switched to

a pageview-based compensation system that gave bonuses to writers based on their monthly trafficfigures These bonuses came on top of a set monthly pay, meaning that bloggers were eligible forpayments that could effectively double their salary once they hit their monthly quota You can imagine

what kind of results this led to I recall a post from a Gawker writer whining about how he didn’t

know how much money he’d make that month—and getting seventeen thousand views for it

The bonus system was so immediately rewarding for Gawker bloggers that the company tweaked

their ratio to deemphasize the bonus slightly The system remains, however, and today the companyhas a big board in its offices that shows the stats for all the writers and their stories When writersaren’t fighting for bonuses, all they have to do is look up to be reminded: If you’re at the bottom of theboard, you might get fired

This is now the standard model for blogs Forbes.com was relaunched with hundreds of bloggercontributors who are paid per visitor Seeking Alpha, a network of financial writers (arguably worth

a lot to its investor-type readers), launched a payment platform in 2010 that pays writers based on thetraffic their posts generate The average payment per article turned out to be only fifty-eight dollarsfor the first six months A writer needs to rack up roughly one hundred thousand views to make evenone thousand dollars—a tough fight when you’re jostling for share of voice against the thousand-plus

writers who publish there each month The blog The Awl announced it would also start paying its

writers using a similar model two years after its founding A dozen or so bloggers split a small pool

of revenue generated by advertisements on the site The more traffic the site does, the larger the pool

It’s the same incentive—desperately dependent on big hits—but instead of fighting each other forpageviews, they’re all in on the hustle together.3

Business Insider, run by Henry Blodget, is barely breaking even, so they don’t have much to pay

their writers Earlier experiments with highly paid, experienced journalists failed to work When hedoes pay his writers, Blodget has a fairly simple rule of thumb: Writers need to generate three timesthe number of pageviews required to pay for their own salary and benefits, as well as a share of theoverhead, sales, hosting, and Blodget’s cut In other words, an employee making $60,000 a yearneeds to produce 1.8 million pageviews a month, every month, or they’re out.4 This is no easy task

Google and YouTube pay their video bloggers solely on how many views they get, once they havebeen verified as a “quality” producer In other cases Google will green-light just one hit video from

an account and allow that to be monetized YouTube sells and serves the ads, takes a substantial cut,and passes the rest on Most of these figures are not public, but a decent account can hope to makeabout one penny per view, or one dollar for every thousand

I remember working with the very popular multiplatinum rock band Linkin Park and realizing theiraccount, which had done over one hundred million views, would earn them barely six figures—to besplit among six guys, a manager, a lawyer, and a record label These kinds of rates force channels bigand small to churn out videos constantly to make money Every view is only a penny in their pocket

Twitter users are straight-up mercenary Through various ad networks you can actually payinfluential accounts to tweet a message of your choosing And by message, I mean that they will tweet

anything.

In order to promote one of Tucker’s books I got a Twitter account with more than four hundredthousand followers to say: “FACT: People will do anything for money”—for twenty-five dollars For

a few hundred dollars more I tricked dozens of other accounts into posting humiliating promotional

messages that pushed the book to a number two debut on the New York Times bestseller list One blog

headline summed it up well: “Tucker Max Proves You Can Pay Celebrities To Tweet Whatever YouWant.”5

Other companies, such as Demand Media, Associated Content, and examiner.com, have revived theearlier payment model and typically pay their writers on a per post and per video basis The figurefor text tends to hover around eight dollars, and slightly more for video

If all these numbers sound small—and they do to me—it isn’t simply because bloggers are gettingshafted It’s because what they produce isn’t worth all that much Political analyst Nate Silver

estimated that the median user-contributed article on the Huffington Post is worth only three dollars

in revenue to the company.6 So even if they were paid fairly for their contributions, it wouldn’t bemuch of a paycheck Silver looked at high-profile articles by former U.S secretary of labor RobertReich that did 547 comments and 27,000 pageviews and concluded that they’d be worth only abouttwo hundred dollars—an amount for which a man like that usually wouldn’t get out of bed Mostarticles from the currently unpaid contributors generate significantly less revenue than that

RIPE FOR EXPLOITATION

All this means that if bloggers want to get rich—or even cover their rent—they’ve got to findother ways to get paid That’s where people like me come in—with boatloads of free stuff

One of the quickest ways to get coverage for a product online is to give it away for free to bloggers(they’ll rarely disclose their conflict of interest) At American Apparel I have two full-time